Discovering Alabama host and producer Doug Phillips says it was his decision to pull an episode on Forever Wild, not pressure from the Attorney General's Office.

The Alabama Public Television program Discovering Alabama
isn't known for being overtly political. Host and producer Dr. Doug Phillips
hikes the hills and paddles the backwaters of the state, guiding viewers
through Alabama's natural beauty.

But Phillips said an episode he produced to air last week
was too close the line of political advocacy ahead of a statewide referendum on
continuing funding for Forever Wild, so he pulled it. Phillips said Monday that
he knows lots of people on both sides of the debate, and he didn't want to give
ammunition to the Forever Wild opponents to use against the state program.

"It occurred to me that they might construe my show as being
that way, even though we did not take any position for or against," he said. "You
might not have to guess, the tone of the show was heavily in favor of Forever
Wild."

Phillips said that the Alabama Attorney General's Office had
sent a memo to state agencies after several had asked what constituted advocacy
of the referendum. That memo warned against using state funding to promote a
political position, Phillips said.

The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural
Resources, one of the Discovering Alabama's underwriters, had asked Phillips if
he had seen the memo, he said. Once he had read the memo, he decided to pull
the episode only hours before it was supposed to air.

"If you tuned in to APT Thursday night at 9:00 p.m. for the
premiere of "Forever Wild Renewal," (The show mentioned in the promo below this
message) well, you did not find it being broadcast (an older Discovering
Alabama program was broadcast instead)," Phillips wrote on the Discovering
Alabama website. "Unfortunately, late Thursday we were apprised of a very
recent memorandum from the State Attorney General's Office regarding actions that
might result in 'influencing the vote or political action.'"

That message touched off a tempest among some Forever Wild
supporters and viewers of the show, but Phillips said Monday it was not an act
of censorship by the state. The decision to postpone the episode was his, he
said.

"Nobody pressured me or anything like that," Phillips said. "Nobody
told me what I could or couldn't do."

A spokesperson for the Attorney General's Office said that there might have been an internal memo exchanged between lawyers, but that it was not an official opinion issued by the office.

Mike McKenzie, a spokesperson for APTV, said that the show was set to air until Phillips called to postpone it. A re-run ran it its place.

Since its inception in 1992, Forever Wild has accumulated
227,000 acres of land for public use in the state. The state has funded Forever
Wild with offshore gas royalties, but that arrangement is set to expire unless
voters approve a renewal on the ballot Nov. 6. If approved, the state would
continue funding Forever Wild for another 20 years.

The referendum has drawn together a peculiar coalition of
environmentalists and hunters and fishermen. The amendment has the support of groups
across the political spectrum, from the National Rifle Association to the
Sierra Club to the Business Council of Alabama. Among Alabama fans, Gene
Stallings has endorsed it, and from the Auburn plains, Pat Dye has backed it,
too.